Lady GaGa is the master at manipulating the mainstream media and the public. She is that good at what she does that everyone is blind to it. I am not a fan of Lady GaGa nor do I have any interest in her music or what she will be releasing. The reason why I am even commenting on her is that she is so good at self-marketing, her recent anti-piracy dummy spit went viral and entered the topic circles that I am interested in.

Let’s recap. Lady Gaga will release her new album ‘ARTPOP’ in November.

Just last week she was in the news for appearing nude in a bizarre video to fund a campaign for Marina Abramovic and some weird art meditation retreat. Of course, all those news articles mentioned the release of her new album ARTPOP. How convenient that this video happened so close to her single release date?

This is Perfect Marketing 1.0 and she didn’t even spend a cent. Her appearance in her birthday suit went viral. The story of the ARTPOP album also went viral along with the news that a new single called ‘Applause’ will be released towards the end of August.

So over the weekend (August 10 and 11), several snippets of the songs are leaked onto the Internet. At first no one really cared. Leaks of songs these days is not even news. So what does Lady GaGa do? She goes to her Twitter account that has almost 40 million followers. She tells her fans she is not impressed at the leak of the snippets. So what do some of her fans do; they launch their very own anti-piracy campaign. Gaga then re-tweeted the campaign on Twitter and then it really gained traction. The snippets went viral. How convenient for Lady GaGa?

Fast forward to today (August 12) and Lady Gaga has released “Applause,” in its entirety a week earlier than planned. Her Twitter account said the following; “DUE TO HACKERS AN ABUNDANCE OF LOW/HIGH QUALITY LEAKS…WE ISSUE THIS POP MUSIC EMERGENCY…MONSTERS SPREAD THE WORD,”

Kudos to Lady Gaga. She played her part in this mainstream media exercise to a tee. Her manipulation of the situation is one that all artists can learn from. This was the plan from the beginning. Watch the track go straight to number one and get ready for further media manipulation marketing strategies as the album date approaches. Lady GaGa is the master.